I used multiple social media platforms and I can say in medium confidence that downvotes are almost useless to see for users.
They are made to influence the algorithm and that’s it, if you are really bothered by them it’s because you saw something you were never intended to see.
Reddit try to communicate this by showing you only one number for the total score and they are trying to not show you if your post score became in negative.
Matter of fact, I personally find downvotes pretty refreshing for me because I expect to hear something I don’t know or a passionate criticism on my opinions or posts.
I think what could discourage me from posting is the lack of comments, not the downvotes.
Note: If you are really bothered about downvotes, you can disable showing down votes on the web client and in the mobile clients by changing that option in the settings.
Downvote if you agree.
I understand getting upset if you made a good faith argument and it gets a ton of downvotes. I still think it’s valid, but I understand why others would disagree.
But people here (and on Reddit) are way too sensitive to them. I have seen too many comments here with “Edit: why am I getting downvoted? Explain yourselves” when it’s got 10 upvotes and 2 downvotes.
Some trolls downvote everything. Some people have bots that downvote everything. Some people have bad reading comprehension and will downvote things they would agree with. Once you assume a baseline level of negativity you’ll stop taking things personally and start enjoying interactions more.
Some people just fat finger it too without intending to down vote.
That’s true. I accidentally downvote things constantly, but immediately upvote if I notice. How many have I missed? How many upvotes were lost to network traffic even though the downvote made it through? How many people have wasted a portion of their only finite life being upset because my finger was one pixel too far right?
Downvotes bother me because they impact the visibility of my content, especially on small communities
THIS is the reason.
Downvoting is literally a form of censorship. It’s the virtual equivalent of shouting someone down.
I sort by Top Daily.
That means that whatever downvotes you will get, I could still see your post.
I am sure that I am not the only one who does this as I first learned of this option on another social media website called Tildes by a user comment and since then it had become the default for me in all the social media websites I use.
If I only get 1 upvote and 2 downvotes, my post would get buried for everyone and you would probably never see it
If you’re bothered by social media votes, you need to go outside more.
Social media isn’t real. It’s a poor simulacrum of human interaction. Find real human beings to interact with and whatever they think of you, tell you, or how they treat you in your face matters.
But whatever people become and how they behave once they hide behind a screen and cast simplistic one-bit click-clicks to express complex human feelings and opinions doesn’t.
Downvoting is intolerance made cheap. It’s a button to say: “You’re wrong, I don’t care what you have to say, LA LA LA LA SHUT UP”. If you did the equivalent of downvoting in an in-person discussion, you would be an asshole.
But what really annoys me personally (someone else mentions it) is that downvoting reduces the visibility of the downvoted opinion. It’s literally soft censorship.
I regularly leave discussions after receiving cheap downvotes in return for my carefully considered contribution. It’s a statistical certainty that I’m not the only one.
Downvoters should consider the opportunity cost of their actions for the quality of the discussion they are taking part in.
I tend to downvote obnoxious comments, or ones that it’s clear the commenter is in love with the ‘sound’ of their own voice. I tend to leave the ‘carefully considered’ ones alone because they add to the conversation unless they stray too far into the above categories.
Interesting. Of course, “obnoxious” and “in love with their own voice” are highly personal judgements that are pretty vulnerable to motivated reasoning. In other words: if they were making a point that you happened to agree with, perhaps you wouldn’t think those things.
I definitely see where you’re coming from. At the same time I don’t tend to get involved in deep discussions where I have strong feelings, on the Internet. I save those for in-person with friends.
I guess I am just very sensitive to tone and (what comes across to me as) arrogant people, and I have downvoted obnoxious comments on all sides of an argument before. I try to be aware of my bias, but nobody’s perfect.
Of course YMMV, but I find blocking people like that (especially on Discord) make my Internet experience much more pleasant.
It’s a button to say: “You’re wrong, I don’t care what you have to say, LA LA LA LA SHUT UP”
Idk, my downvotes mean “ugh”.
I disagree but my instance has downvotes disabled so i can’t downvote you like you’ve requested :p
I got free Unlimited pure true downvotes on my instance.🫂
[FreeBSD approved virtual hug, No homo]
One instance explained to me that they disabled downvoting because of massive brigading issues due to what they are and what they stand for. I had assumed that everyone over there was just fragile… but apparently it’s a real issue for them folk and that had never occurred to me before.
It doesn’t take a lot of effort for a few shitty folks to silence people they hate by quickly down voting anything that comes from a small instance. While the instance that I know of disabled the downvotes to improve the experience for users of their instance, I don’t see their stuff in the All feed very often so they are probably still being silenced outside their instance.
Imagine being so fragile that you can’t even accept that some people live a different way to you and wanting them shut down as a result.
I think upvoting and downvoting should remain a feature for sorting posts, but the scores shouldn’t be visible to anyone. Making scores public encourages people to say what’s popular and discourages them from expressing unpopular opinions, even if they believe them to be true. Humans are social creatures, and we care too much about what others think. If you agree or disagree with someone and want them to know, you should tell them directly rather than anonymously ranking them.
No thanks, I enjoy watching tankies and other terrible people get downvoted into oblivion in an exchange with one other poster instead of getting a ton of repetitive replies telling them they are wrong.
Are you sure it’s not that people who aren’t bothered by downvotes disagree with you on how to use social media.
People use these their own way. And good on them, screw what makes some shareholders more money
And because of that, downvotes remain off for me.
Or perhaps just let people disabled downvotes if they don’t like them :). I’m not hurting you, in fact, I can only upvote.
I don’t like the fact niche hobbyist communities on lemmy often have half their posts downvoted because people saw it on c/all and downvoted for no reason.
It’s human nature for people to feel upset by their message being undermined…but they should be able to get over it.
The bigger problem I have is that the downvoters don’t know how to USE downvotes. Instead of downvoting inaccurate content or engaging in any reasoning, people just downvote what they personally don’t like and disagree with. Which is bullshit.
I admit to posting shitty comments sometimes, just because I feel some adversity is nice. Lemmy seems pretty uniform, politically. That just annoys me. So I get a fair share of downvotes. In general, I don’t take online discussions in comment sections too seriously, though. I mean, you can’t expect people there to actually research and listen to arguments. It mostly seems like emotional venting/searching for confirmation of your bias to me.
Sounds more like you’re an asshole that hides behind the excuse of devils advocate to say shitty things
To me it reads more as someone who is jaded, cynical, perhaps a bit wounded by other people’s attacks on them and projecting their insecurity and frustration about that.
IMO very few people are assholes by nature. If we can create an atmosphere, and tools, that encourage civility, then we will get civility.
PieFed also just shows one number.
I am a 5-star man
